I was super excited about WolframAlpha awhile back, but let’s just say that I found the product incredibly uninteresting and uncompelling in its current state.  Any question that is actually interesting to ask, it is simply unable to answer.  Anything it can answer, you can find just as easily from a Google search or Wikipedia or what have you.

Today, I also learned how not up-to-date it is.  Look at this result:

Worthless.  Totally worthless.

(P.S.  You can bet the Wikipedia entry on Michael Jackson’s death was updated in near real-time, as he lay dying.)

Geez.  There’s so many of them.  But, this one was funny.  I uninstalled Xobni after a day.  Couldn’t really see the use, didn’t like the extra processing power it required, and cluttered an already busy enough Outlook interface.

After completing the uninstall, I was sent to the ridiculous webpage above. Oh, really? Is that so? Well, I’ll be damned!

It’s been awhile, but I cringed this morning when I heard Obama sound just like Bush, mangling basic Spanish.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1O9txBU9FE[/youtube]

Now, this is the type of crap I hear all the time at work, on TV shows, in movies, and elsewhere… monoglot Americans seeming to relish their lack of command of the most rudimentary parts of a language that is spoken by something like 15% of the U.S. population. But, I forgive these morons because they just don’t know any better.

However, for a U.S. President, who relies on many of these voters who might only speak Spanish, in a country that is projected to have an almost 25% Hispanic population by the year 2050, I just cannot comprehend this type of gaffe.

Is it so hard to fucking learn a little español, señor presidente? Por favor!

Damn you, Bush!

(Doug Mills/The New York Times)

So, GM and Chrysler get emergency loans to prevent their collapse so that they can reorganization and prove that they can return to profitability… basically, it’s like giving money to your drug addict, alcoholic uncle so that he can pay for his own rehab, and next year you’ll check in on him to see how he’s doing.

Fuck that.  I really just don’t understand this.  It’s one thing to protect the financial markets (which I think was probably an overstatement), but automobiles are not essential to our functioning.  Certainly not Dodge Stratuses and Buick LeSabres.

I say you put down a wounded animal… you don’t put it on a respirator for 3 months.

I wouldn’t say I’m kept up all night wondering who will solve this “problem”… I question whether or not there is a real problem here to be solved in the first place. But developers, entrepreneurs, businesses, and venture capitalists alike seem to be obsessed with this notion of integrating/consolidating the social graph, the lifestreams, the feeds, and the contact lists. Make the über-application which will solve all communication needs. Isn’t this just a fantasy? Is there really conceptually or even practically a need to unify everything? Isn’t this an exercise in futility? Isn’t fragmentation and compartmentalization just a human reality? I think we as people prefer to keep multiple lists, whether they’re in our heads, our handhelds, or on some website.

So, do we have one place (finally) to keep all our friends thanks to Power.com? No, just one more… add it to the pile of hundreds of other endeavors that will ultimately go nowhere… just one more attempted solution, creating new problems, solving few, adding to our increasingly mangled, digital lives. Yippee.

So, I spent a lot of time researching and learning about the voting process and user experience, how elections work, and the issues from voter registration challenges to voter suppression and disenfranchisement to apathy to shitty DRE voting systems. This was for my company’s blog: www.artefactgroup.com/blog. I thought I was only getting myself into writing one article, maybe with a group of people, evaluating one of these DRE voting machines, commenting on design and usability problems, and ultimately making some suggestions for improvement. Something akin to the work done by AIGA Design for Democracy, but without the rigor.

Well, I ended up writing four postings, totaling well over 8,000 words. And that was after cutting a whole bunch from the last piece. It’s a little long-winded and highfalutin, but if you want to read the articles, here they are:

• The Future Voter Experience (preview): Bouncing Michigan
• The Future Voter Experience, Part 1: Voting Technology History
• The Future Voter Experience, Part 2: Voter Needs, Usability, and the Larger Voting Process
• The Future Voter Experience, Part 3: Trends and the Future of the Voter Experience

I’d love it if you left comments!

You know what’s so fucking annoying?  Bailing out auto companies (or airlines) because they’re stupid and don’t know how to be competitive businesses.

(Doug Mills/The New York Times)

I feel bad for people losing their jobs, but tough shit.  Sometimes things change… and, so, you have to adapt.  Learn a new skill.  Find something else to do.  Nothing is forever.

How long have the warning signs been telling us that GM and Ford were fucked?  The financials (see a 10-year chart of GM and Ford versus Toyota and Honda below) have been shit for years.  And, if design means anything to you, you probably have known for at least a decade (or more) that American automobiles’ heyday has long since passed.

Why should you bail these guys out?  They make a shit product that doesn’t meet the demands of the market.  They can’t run a profit.  They fuck over their loyal employees and can’t pay their pensions and retirements.

If I ran my business this way, nobody would bail me out.

Remember Joseph Schumpeter’s “creative destruction?”  Let these mf’ers in Detroit die.  Instead of bailing out GM and Ford (who have done plenty of R&D over the years into alternative fuels, hybrids, and electric cars, but never had the will to bring them to market), why not give a little money to the Teslas and the Propels of the world.  Let the innovators reap the rewards.  Besides, if Toyota’s plants are here on U.S. soil, it’s good for employment anyway.  Screw shareholder value.  Or buy Toyota stock.

I meant to add this awhile back but never did.  It’s just too good to not have.

Probably the worst, most heinous new feature I’ve seen in Vista… inexpicable, really — so unbelievably wrong and terrible from any and all design and human-centered perspectives — is this “copy file” dialog when you are, say, dragging a file into a folder and there’s already an existing file with the same name there.

All I have to say is, “what the fuck were they thinking?”  My jaw dropped when I saw this the first time, and after the 100th time I’m still aghast at the sea of words, obfuscating and overcomplicating everything.  Then some douchebag named Awesome-O (he doesn’t deserve that South Park moniker) actually thinks it would be a good idea to add a fourth option?!  I guess there actually is a real target user for this shit… someone who actually likes arcane, totally unnecessary features.  It truly frightens me.

Compare People is, like, super lame. Ever notice how the person voted hottest person or most desirable to date in your group of friends is decidedly not?  All elections are rigged!  Life is a farce!

Jesus, I don’t even know where to start, but I’ve just about had it with Vista after 3 days working in it (on a MacBook Pro, of all places… which, if you ask me is completely idiotic… and, frankly, it undermines the experience and pleasure of using the fine Apple hardware… not just because the keyboard and other hardware aren’t really optimized for Windows but because you see the titanium shell and think, oooh, this is a Mac, but in reality your system takes forever to boot up, crashes all the time, and does all sorts of stupid shit that cannot be explained… but enough, I digress…).

Actually, not much more to say.  You all know how horrible Vista is (and the new Office?  omg!  I really hate it!).

But, here’s something funny.  Somehow I accidentally copied the Documents folder into my user folder so there are now 2 of them.  I try to delete one (which is empty, while the other isn’t).  But it won’t let me!

Sorry… just wanted to vent.